Let me tell you guys a story about my mom, Rebecca Gansburg Sankey.
When I was young, for a few years me and my brothers went to school in a one room Christian schoolhouse type situation inside our church. At most there were like 23 kids in the entire school any given year, one year there might have been like 12. It was tiny. Everyone knew each other super well. Lots of gossip.
My family was always weird to people. My parents had 7 children, mostly boys. Inviting the Drews anywhere was like inviting an entire circus to your event. We were a large family of loud, overdramatic people. We were a rolling mess. My mom and dad both worked full-time jobs on top of the nightmare of taking care of six boys and one girl so they were always tired, and we missed church a lot. We knew this was held against us.
One year, over Christmas break the superintendent had apparently heard the voice of God telling her to take certain students in the tiny school and make them “spiritual officers” and assign them roles. No democracy though, we didn’t get to vote on who got chosen, the superintendent just picked out the kids who got it. Her kids all got in, so did all of her kids’ best friends. None of the Drew boys got picked. I still remember that day when the superintendent told the whole school “Okay everyone, the spiritual officers are going to go into the lunchroom to discuss how to make our school more godly” and me and my brothers just heard our peers shooting the shit loudly for an hour one room over while we had to do work. It was followed by a weird three days of being talked down to by these kids that had been arbitrarily endowed with authority over us.
Finally, I broke down and told my mom what was going on. I would have told her sooner but she had always worked the night shift so it wasn’t unusual for me not to see my mother for 3-4 days at a time. When I explained to her what was happening, she flipped. She went Super Saiyan. She complained to the superintendent. The school called a special faculty meeting with all the major staff and the pastor of the church. She went there on no sleep and passionately fought for her children, ripping on everyone for not including us and telling them exactly how stupid this whole program really was. By the end of the week, the spiritual officers were relieved of their positions and the experiment was over.
God made a decision and my mom vetoed it. That was the week I realized my mom outranked God.
This guest post was penned by Boston based comedian Justin P. Drew. You can see more of Justin on his site, listen to him on his podcast Drew Romance, and see him on Instagram.